Pilot, passenger killed in light aircraft crash near Afula

A pilot and his passenger were killed when a light aircraft crashed on Saturday afternoon near Afula.

The plane came down in an agricultural field near the northern city and the two people were declared dead by emergency services teams on the scene.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

In November Maj. (res.) Itay Zayden, a 42-year-old from Kibbutz Shoval and Corporal Lihu Ben-Bassa, 19, from Rishon Lezion were killed in a light plane crash in the south. The military said that the deadly crash of the training plane occurred due to a “lack of control,” but that the specific cause for the accident was still unknown.

Last May a businessman was killed and his 14-year-old son was injured when the light aircraft they were in crashed in a field near Kibbutz Yakum in central Israel.

Shay Ben-Yitzhak, 52, and his teenage son were trapped in the plane and eventually extracted from the wreckage by rescue teams before the boy was airlifted to a hospital.